Dear Blizzard, Thanks for making gems near useless. You made sockets take up 1 affix and no way to add sockets with artisans. Then you cleverly added affixes on items that add 100+ of a single stat while gems at their best add half that. Go ahead and call me wrong fanbois. But in 2 months you’ll see that I spoke the truth. Keep reducing the “complexity” of the game, cause that’s OBVIOUSLY what made diablo 2 such a success.

As items can’t roll two of the same stat (although hybrid affixes can overlap) a socket allows you to stack more of a specific stat. So even if you reach the upper limit of a specific stat on an item, with a socket you can overcome that limitation. Want to really stack VIT? Even if you’re hitting an upper limit of just straight affixes rolling on an item, you can add more VIT if the item has sockets.

Oh… and regardless of how many sockets you have, it only counts as a single affix. If an item rolls up 2 or 3 sockets, that still only accounts for a single affix spot on the item. An item rolling up sockets can absolutely be better than affixes.

Forgive me for the question (I’m not familiar very much with the Diablo Series), but how does that work with putting different gems in the sockets, such as 2 Dex and 1 Vit? How does it treat all three sockets as one affix if there are two different gems in it? I think I’m confusing myself

You are! So items will have an affix limit. Like “a rare of this level can only roll up 4 affixes max”. Gem sockets, regardless of how many, only account for one of those 4 affixes. (in this hypothetical situation in which this particular rare is limited to 4) So this item rolls up +MF, and they’re boots so +movement speed, and +Int and then also rolls two gem sockets. So that’s the 4 affix limit.